Sal Sferlazza

CEO and Co-Founder NinjaOne

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sal Sferlazza is CEO and co-founder of NinjaOne, the Austin company that sells a single console for managing, patching, backing up and securing every endpoint an IT department is responsible for. He started it in 2013 with Chris Matarese, who is now NinjaOne’s president and CFO, and the two have kept control of it: the company’s June 2026 announcement of a $12.3 billion valuation states plainly that it remains founder-led and debt-free with its co-founders retaining majority ownership. That is unusual at this scale, and it is the through-line of his career — NinjaOne is at least his fifth company and the first he has not sold, following Realm Interactive, Lasso Logic, PacketTrap and Anchor Networks, each of which went to an acquirer.

Career Highlights

• CEO and co-founder of NinjaOne, which he started with Chris Matarese in 2013 as NinjaRMM.
• Announced a $12.3 billion valuation on 9 June 2026 following more than $400 million in Series C extensions, with participation from Wellington Management, Teachers’ Venture Growth, BDT & MSD Partners’ affiliated funds, Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ, Hedosophia, NEA, Washington Harbour Partners, CapitalG and Pinegrove Opportunity Partners.
• NinjaOne reports nearly 70% year-over-year growth in 2025 and profitability in a record first quarter, and was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Management Tools.
• Serves nearly 40,000 customers across more than 140 countries with a team of over 2,000, while remaining debt-free with majority control held by the two co-founders.
• Sits on NinjaOne’s board alongside Chris Matarese and investor directors from ICONIQ and Summit Partners, with CrowdStrike chairman Gerhard Watzinger and former ZoomInfo CMO/CPO Hila Nir.
• A repeat founder before NinjaOne: Realm Interactive, Lasso Logic, PacketTrap, Anchor Networks and Boostingo.

Professional Journey

NinjaOne’s own materials say very little about Sferlazza’s life before 2013, so the earlier chronology below is attributed to the Wikipedia article on him rather than asserted; its citations are to named trade and business outlets, but those articles were not read for this profile.

On that account, his first company was Realm Interactive, founded in 2001 with Chris Matarese — the same partner he would still be working with a quarter-century later. It was a games business, building a title called Exarch as a successor to Trade Wars, and it was sold to NCSoft in 2004; the work eventually shipped as Dungeon Runners. In 2005 he co-founded Lasso Logic, a San Francisco company doing continuous data protection and off-site backup for small and mid-sized businesses at a point when that was a genuinely new idea. SonicWALL acquired it that November — a transaction that is independently documented, in a trade report framing it as part of a broader convergence of storage and security after a run of high-profile data losses. He then co-founded PacketTrap, in IT network management, which went to Quest Software, and founded Anchor Networks, a cloud managed service provider, sold to eFolder in 2013.

That last date matters, because 2013 is also when he and Matarese started NinjaRMM. The sequence is legible: having built and sold a backup company, a network management company and a managed service provider, he had spent a decade assembling the pieces of what an IT department actually needs and watching each of them get absorbed into somebody else’s suite. NinjaOne is the attempt to build the whole thing in one place and keep it.

The company started in San Francisco, rebranded from NinjaRMM to NinjaOne and moved its headquarters to Austin in 2021. The product is now positioned as a unified IT operations platform — endpoint management, remote access, autonomous patching, vulnerability management, backup, mobile device management and IT asset management in a single console — and the company’s stated ambition is to be “the control plane for unified IT” in an AI era.

Its financial trajectory has been steep. Wikipedia records a $30 million round from Summit Partners and a $231 million round at a $1.9 billion valuation led by ICONIQ in early 2024. By 9 June 2026 NinjaOne announced a $12.3 billion valuation on more than $400 million of Series C extensions, following a year of nearly 70% growth and a first quarter in which it reached profitability. What distinguishes the announcement from most raises at that size is the ownership note: the money came in as secondary funding, and Sferlazza and Matarese retain majority control of a debt-free company. Having sold four previous startups, he has structured this one so that he does not have to sell it.

Education

No education record is asserted here. The Wikipedia article on Sferlazza states that he graduated from the State University of New York at Albany in 1996, and lists SUNY Albany in its infobox, but the citations it gives for that sentence are The Org and a listicle site. The Org is an aggregator that this project treats as not constituting evidence, so Wikipedia repeating it does not make the claim independently sourced. NinjaOne publishes no biography for him on its leadership or author pages. The SUNY Albany claim is recorded here as unverified rather than omitted, so that a later pass can confirm it from the university, a filing or the company rather than re-discovering the same aggregator.